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Dean of Faculty Report, May 2009

At every monthly faculty meeting during the school year, the Dean of Faculty presents brief overviews of recent publications and other achievements by the Mount Holyoke faculty. Here are excerpts from the May 2009 report of Donal O'Shea, Dean of Faculty.

Grants

Kathy Aidala, Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Physics, received $45,000 from Research Corporation for her proposal Investigation and Control of Magnetic Nanorings Using a Scanning Probe Microscope. Kathy works closely with a group of investigators who have made the smallest nanorings (super-tiny rings) to date. These rings can have some very different magnetic states. The grant will allow Kathy and her students to use highly non-traditional scanning probe techniques to manipulate the rings’ magnetic states and to measure the result. No one has investigated rings as small as those that Kathy and her students propose to examine. Kathy’s work will be critical to the imaging of these rings and even tinier rings that will be fabricated in future—when the rings are so small, the effects of the probes alter the magnetic states, which means that one needs sophisticated algorithms and software to figure out what the rings look like and how they would behave before being deformed by the probe.

Patricia Banks, assistant professor of sociology, has received two major fellowships. The first is a Woodrow Wilson fellowship for her project Art and Class in Black America. The fellowship will allow her to complete a book that examines how middle-class blacks construct black identities through patronage of black visual art. Such patronage includes collecting paintings by or about black people, attending fundraisers at black museums, and attending black art shows. Patricia has conducted over 100 in-depth interviews with middle-class blacks in 87 households in New York City and Atlanta. This exceedingly rich data set will require as much time to analyze as it took to assemble. The second fellowship is a prized residency at Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Studies.

Debbora Battaglia, professor of anthropology, has won this year’s Verville Fellowship. The fellowship will allow her to spend a semester at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM) in Washington, where she will pursue her own work and work with staff scientists at the NASM on space studies. Debbora’s work has ranged widely over space studies and she has been a leader in an international group of scholars imagining outer space for creative science/science/arts/humanities/social science exchange. Her work at the NASM draws from personal diaries, artwork, poetry, photography, drawings, and other creative activities (even zero-gravity recipes) of shuttle and space station astronauts. The Verville fellowship is very competitive and the fellows have traditionally been a highly interdisciplinary group. (The current holder comes to the position from the Holocaust Museum in DC, and the previous year’s was the USAF’s chief historian.) Debbora has been responsible for arranging a number of internships for her students at the NASM.

Bettina Bergmann, Helene Phillips Herzig ’49 Professor of Art History, received a grant of $4,000 from the Florence Gould Foundation to help fund her project Reconstructing the Villa of Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, and a $10,000 grant from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Boscoreale was a small town a couple of kilometers outside of Pompeii and was in the heart of the region where olive oil and wine were produced in Roman times. The highly productive and lavishly decorated villa was buried during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 C.E. and not rediscovered until 1900. Sadly, the magnificent frescoes, which are among the most important anywhere in the Roman world, along with the silver vessels and other contents, were smuggled out of Italy and sold through Paris auctions. The most famous pieces belong to museums in New York, Naples, Belgium, and France. Working together with the King’s Visualization Lab in London, the national (CNRS) labs at the École Normale Supérieure and the Louvre in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Bettina and her colleagues will collect high quality digital images of the dispersed objects and use them to produce a virtual model of the villa. This will allow the rest of us to visualize and travel through the villa as it was. Incidentally, Bettina was heavily involved with, and contributed an essay to, Pompeii and the Roman Villa, the catalog for the Pompeii exhibition in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The catalog is amazing and so, apparently, was the show. Bettina took her class to it. The catalog appears on a White House coffee table in a publicity photo of Laura Bush and Michelle Obama chatting together, taken in the waning days of the Bush administration.

Mount Holyoke College Art Museum director Marianne Doezema, curator Wendy Watson, and their colleagues at the museum received $500,000 from the Mellon Foundation to fund their proposal to strengthen the academic role of the museum’s collection and programs. This is an amazing achievement. Very few art museums get such awards; those that do tend to be large operations at major universities. The award comes with the strong possibility of continued support and, if all goes well, with a possible grant to endowment nine years down the road.

Darby Dyar, associate professor and chair of astronomy, has received three grants. The first, entitled Scaffolding Effective Practice for Use of Animations in Teaching Mineralogy and Physical Geology, is from the National Science Foundation’s CCLI (curricular) program. It will provide $96,616 over a two-year period to allow Darby and her colleagues at Hampshire College, the University of Idaho, and Taso Graphics, Inc., to develop computer animations and visualization tools for use in two of the common gateway courses to the geosciences, physical geology and mineralogy. Teaching students to visualize information in three dimensions is key to the geosciences, and Darby proposes to use recent findings about teaching and learning growing out of research in cognitive psychology to create effective online tools. The tools will be available on a pilot websitehosted by Mount Holyoke and will provide a rich resource to other educators (and students). Darby also received $719,000 from the NASA program that funds fundamental research related to Mars for her four-year project Technique Development for Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy: Calibration, Classification, and Light Element Analysis. Laser-induced breakdown spectrometry (LIBS) uses laser pulses to zap and excite atoms in a sample and observes the emission lines that come out of the resulting plasma. Because other techniques of analysis have been available, geoscientists have not really exploited such spectrometry (although it has found applications in industry). However, an LIBS spectrometer and a remote micro-imager will be on the Mars Scientific Laboratory lander, and Darby and her team have been working over the last two years to assemble calibration data from a very large suite of samples that will allow interpretation of emission lines observed on Martian samples. Much has been done, but much more is required. The funds will allow Darby to build a close-up LIBS spectrometer at Mount Holyoke, which will in turn allow her students to more quickly help assembling calibration data. At the moment, the only other such device in the United States is at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and a second one would significantly increase the likelihood of the necessary calibration work actually being done. (Actually, there is another LIBS facility at the University of Hawaii, but it is not suitable for the work that needs to be done.) The data that Darby and her students have collected are posted on a websitehosted by Mount Holyoke. It is a fundamental, and well-used, resource for geology and planetary science researchers (well over a quarter of a million hits since it started three years ago). Finally, Darby and Rachel Klima, visiting assistant professor of astronomy, received funding from NASA’s Lunar Advanced Science and Exploration Research program for a large project entitled Pyroxene Spectroscopy as a Tool to Probe the Composition and Thermal History of the Lunar Surface. Pyroxene is a very common mineral on the lunar surface. It also has the property that its crystal structure (actually the extra trace elements in its crystal) is acutely sensitive to the way the mineral formed and how it cooled. The crystal structure, and hence, the history of lunar rocks that contain pyroxene, can be inferred from the spectra of lunar rocks, once one has a sufficiently rich set of spectroscopic data from known samples on earth (and the moon). The grant will allow Darby and her students and labs at Brown University to assemble these data. The grant will supply $120,914 to Mount Holyoke to facilitate this work.

Janice Gifford, professor of statistics, and Jillian McLeod, assistant professor of mathematics, received $367,500 from NSF for their project, Mount Holyoke Undergraduate Mathematics Research Institute. The award is effective May 15, 2009 and expires April 30, 2014. The grant reflects an astonishing record of achievement on behalf of Janice and Jillian and the mathematics and statistics department at Mount Holyoke as a whole. The summer mathematics institute has been funded continuously since its inception in 1988. The grant allows the mathematics and statistics department to bring eight to ten exceedingly talented mathematics and statistics students from across the country to work in groups with some of Mount Holyoke’s ablest students on pressing and unsolved problems at the forefront of mathematical research. In its over 20 years, the institute has become nationally, and even internationally, known for both the mathematics it (sometimes) produces and the more than 100 mathematicians and statisticians who are now on the front lines of research. It is very difficult to get NSF funding, and the funding for research sites for undergraduates is particularly hard to get. It is also exceedingly rare for the NSF to fund any project for 20 years, let alone the 25 years of funding this project will have received by the time the grant expires in 2014.

Beth Hooker, interim director of the Center for the Environment and visiting assistant professor of environmental studies, just received a four-year grant for $148,375 from SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program) for her project on nutrient management on organic farms in southern New England. With colleagues at UConn, UMass, and UNH Extension, Beth will work with 225 organic vegetable farmers on studying and implementing better techniques for measuring and maintaining optimum levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in soils. Maintaining the right levels of these nutrients is more difficult when using organic fertilizers.

Martha Hoopes, Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, and 12 other ecologists (PI is Laurel J. Anderson at Ohio Wesleyan) received a grant of $32,990 from the NSF for their project, The Role of Small Colleges in Continental-Scale Science. The grant funded a workshop to explore how investigators at small colleges could form broad coalitions of collaborators who could share expertise and data collected by students to address a broad range of ecological experiments aimed at addressing major ecological and scientific problems. More specifically, these ecologists and their students proposed to exploit NEON (the National Ecological Observatory Network) and concurrent advances in distributed cyber-networks and data-sharing software to teach and participate in ecology at midrange and large spatial and temporal scales. It’s a great project. Speaking of distributed networks, Martha is one of four authors on a neat paper in the journal Ecology [89 (9) 2008 pp. 2377-2383]. Martha and her coauthors point out that, contrary to what one would expect, several very different mathematical models give very good agreement with actually observed outbreaks of invasive species. This is curious and suggests that no conclusions about the underlying dynamics can be reliably inferred from observation of invasive species. Worse, some new models have actually done a disservice to our understanding because of their authors’ tendency to redefine variables and their rates of change.

Lilian Hsu, Elizabeth Page Greenawalt Professor of Biochemistry, received $465,000 from NSF for her three-year project, Mechanism of Promoter escape by E. coli RNA Polymerase. Transcription of protein-coding genes is a fundamental life process. Lilian currently investigates the biochemical mechanisms involved in the phenomenon known as “promoter escape.” This is the end of the beginning of transcription, the stage when RNA polymerase must start to let go of its hold on promoter DNA and proceed along the gene to transcribe it. The “escape” process turns out to be not only highly complicated, but also quite variable. In some parts of the chromosome, it is far easier for RNA polymerase to be released from the promoter region, while in others, the release process is longer and more complicated. The ease and speed of release strongly affects the overall rate of transcription initiation and is therefore of great importance in gene regulation. Lilian and her students have been studying the process of promoter escape in the bacterium Escherichia coli for some years and have contributed essential details to the current understanding of the geometric conformation of RNA polymerase and the role it plays in escape.

Janice Hudgings, associate professor and chair of physics, has received a $150,000 Small Business Technology Transfer award from NSF for her project Thermoreflectance for Defect Mapping and Process Control of Solar Cells. I believe this is the first time that a faculty member at the College has received such a grant. The purpose of these grants is to facilitate the commercialization of fundamental scientific findings. In this instance, NSF is interested in having Janice set up a company to explore the practical technological consequences of the work that she and her students have done.

Rogelio Miñana, associate professor and chair of Spanish, has received a $5,000 Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society for his project Living Quixote: The Role of a Spanish Cultural Icon in Contemporary Brazilian Social Justice Movements.

Lynn Morgan, Mary E. Woolley Professor of Anthropology, has been named a Weatherhead Resident Scholar at the School for Advanced Research on Human Experience in Santa Fe to continue her work on the dramatic transformations affecting reproductive health across Latin America. The award comes with a $20,000 grant and lodging, and is highly prestigious. In the last 36 years, 196 awards have been made (fully 16 of previous award winners have gone on to win MacArthur genius awards).

Maisie Shaw, senior laboratory instructor in chemistry, received a $26,000 grant for her project with Maria Gomez, associate professor of chemistry, and the chemistry department entitled Passport to Chemistry Adventure for Elementary School Students and Their Parents. The idea is to have chemistry kits that students can check out of the school library and work on with their parents. Doing the activities entitles the student to a stamped passport that permits them to participate in “Chemistry Adventure Day” at Mount Holyoke College.

Michael Stage, visiting assistant professor of astronomy, received a grant of $50,000 from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for his project on nonthermal sources of high-energy (X- and gamma ray) radiation from supernova. The common assumption is that most such radiation is synchrotron radiation, which is the electromagnetic radiation produced by the acceleration of relativistic charged particles (that is, particles that are already moving near the speed of light) in a magnetic field. In particular, since anything moving in a curved path is accelerating, charged particles spiraling and trapped in high-magnetic fields near pulsars and black holes would emit synchrotron radiation. Michael has questioned this assumption, and the grant will allow him and his students to study carefully the spectra of a number of supernovas.

Sharon Stranford, associate professor of biological sciences, has received $224,356 from the National Institutes of Health for her project on MAIDS Resistance-Associated Gene Expression in Secondary Lymphoid Organs. It is still not clear to researchers how infection with HIV in humans leads to AIDS. Sharon and her students will study the development of the mouse version of AIDS (known as MAIDS) in two different strains of laboratory mice. After infection by the retrovirus, one strain develops symptoms similar to human AIDS, while the other strain resists disease. Sharon’s lab will focus on studying the genes that are active in the resistant mice shortly after the infection. They think it is possible that such genes may play an important role in disease resistance. Clearly, positive results would be very significant for human AIDS and might even lead to new ways and studies to combat the disease. Sharon has one of the bigger labs (in terms of number of students) in the College. In previous work, she and her students identified a number of enzymes that seem to be differentially expressed in the resistant and susceptible mouse strains. They will use the technique of real-time polymerase chain reaction to confirm the RNA levels of the differentially expressed genes that give rise to these enzymes, and then try to tie everything together.

Books

Nigel Alderman, assistant professor of English, has coedited with C. D. Blanton a book entitled A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry that has just appeared with Wiley-Blackwell. “The mere fact,” he writes, “that we have no better term than “postwar” for a historical interlude over a half a century long, then, should already suggest the inevitability of a backward glance towards those revolutions, disasters, and new beginnings that brought the postwar order (and its various disorders) into being.” The result is fascinating. The book begins with a curiously provocative year-by-year chronology from 1945 to 2008 of political events in Ireland and Britain and appearances of poetry. So, for example, under 1986 one sees riots in Brixton, deregulation of the LSE, and British Gas privatized juxtaposed with the appearance of Adcock’s The Incident Book; Fisher’s A Furnace; Middleton’s Two Horse Wagon Going By; and Silkin’s The Pasture. In addition to an introduction, Nigel contributes an essay entitled “Myth, History and the New Poetry” that explores the formulation of a historical poetics, and that distinguishes usefully, with lots of examples, among empirical, existential, typological, and textual historicopoetics. Separately from all this, Nigel has a paper in the most recent edition of the Milton Quarterly [42 (3) 2008 pp. 183-196] that interprets Paradise Regained and Simon Agonistes as a working out of a curious logic of memory.

Visiting assistant professor of film studies Heath Atchley’s new book, Encountering the Secular: Philosophical Endeavors in Religion and Culture, has just appeared with the University of Virginia Press. Heath argues that philosophy, or at least a philosophy that takes religion seriously, can be described as a confrontation with the secular. He develops the theme in a series of short, well-written chapters, each devoted to a particular concept in which the boundary between the secular and the religious is somewhat porous. Examples include silence, mourning, presence, enlightenment, and disturbance. The result is satisfying and really neat.

Chris Benfey, Mellon Professor of English, has had two additional books appear. [A third, A Summer of Hummingbirds, appeared earlier in the academic year and was enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Review of Books by Joyce Carol Oates (September 25, 2008)]. American Audacity: Literary Essays North and South is a collection of some of his essays on two clusters of American writers, New Englanders and Southerners. Chris’s introductory essay on his own intellectual history, the partial demise of literary theory, the New Critics, and the New Historicism is well worth the price of the book. “The challenge,” he writes, “for writers of my generation has been to find ways to dust off the layers of reverence and regard that have accumulated on the plaster busts of Emerson and Longfellow.” He succeeds wildly, and the essays that follow and that have appeared over the last decade in the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books are simply splendid. This book appears in the well-known Writers on Writing series of the University of Michigan Press and is a perfect gift. Chris has also edited a book of Lafcadio Hearn’s writings [Hearn, Lafcadio, and Christopher Benfey (ed.). Lafcadio Hearn: American Writings. New York: Library of America, 2009.]. Hearn (1850-1904) arrived broke in the U.S., began his career as a newspaper journalist, became relatively well known for his writing, and moved permanently to Japan. A really nice review of the book appears in the March 20 edition of the Wall Street Journal.

Most of us know of the revolution in our notion of time at the beginning of the twentieth century. Far less well known, at least to most of us who are not medievalists, is the earlier change in our conception of time in the fourteenth century. If you have thrilled to speculative accounts of how industrialization, railroads, capitalism, post-Enlightenment science, whatever, provided the social substrate for Einstein’s realization that time cannot be separated from how it is measured and is, therefore, intricately bound up with the nature of space, then you are going to **LOVE** the current special issue of the Chaucer Review that Carolyn Collette, Professor of English Language and Literature on the Alumnae Foundation, and her colleague, Nancy Bradbury of Smith, have just edited. Entitled Time, Measure, and Value in Chaucer’s Art and Chaucer’s World, it begins with a couple of essays by Carolyn and Nancy that broadly examine the change in view of time from something celestial to something to be measured and quantified, in several Anglo-Norman literary works. The two ascribe the change to the invention of clockwork mechanisms, and analyze the impact of these on the literary and poetic imaginations of a number of Anglo-Norman authors, before closely examining an instance in Chaucer. The other essays deal more directly with Chaucer’s treatment of time and manage not to overlap at all, talking about things like deliberate imprecision, commodification of time, bureaucratization, de-metrification, and time trickery. But, as Carolyn and Nancy point out, there is a playfulness to Chaucer that resists theoretization, and this volume is as delightful as it is scholarly. Where else could one learn that the squire in The Summoner’s Tale does with a fart what Ptolemy does with cosmos: that is, “he approaches a real world phenomenon in a way that allows for a two-dimensional geometrical rationalization”? (See the marvelous essay “Measuring the Immeasurable: Farting, Geometry, and Theology …”.)

If you ever need a gift for a family with a lovable, but poorly behaved, dog, English Professor Corinne Demas’s new children’s book Always in Trouble is for you. It tells the story of Toby, the high-spirited dog who aces obedience school, but chews up his diploma and can’t resist the neighbors’ garbage.

Professor of psychology and education Gail Hornstein’s latest book, Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness, has just appeared with Rodale Press. It is an extraordinary book, the culmination of many years of research on first-person madness narratives and interviews with mental patients. The book tells the story of a number of “mental patients” from their point of view, using their voices. And what voices they are. The book takes its name from an extraordinary jacket, now displayed in a Heidelberg museum, that was stitched together from scraps covered in writing by an inmate of a German insane asylum in the late nineteenth century. Gail’s contention, richly supported, is that the madness narratives not only provide an entirely different, and often enlightening, window on the range of human experience, but also in fact offer new ways to think about and to treat psychiatric disorders. Some passages terrify. Others amuse. In the end, the book is profoundly moving and hopeful: a testament to our shared humanity.

Jim Hartley, professor of economics and director of first-year seminars, has collected a number of writings by Mary Lyon in Mary Lyon: Documents and Writings that appeared late last fall with Doorlight Publications. Her letters and meditations illuminate the extraordinary mixture of will, faith, and shrewd practicality that she brought to bear on the founding of the College. They testify to her unsentimental commitment to her students and to the generations of women who would follow, and they underscore how hard she worked and how close failure, exhaustion, and despair lay. The triumph of clearheaded resolve, service, dignity, and quiet courage is as moving and timely today as it was in the early nineteenth century. That said, some passages, notably the more fervent evangelical ones, remind one sharply that the College today is a far different, and far more attractive, place than it was in those halcyon days.

Some Interesting Articles

There has been a great deal of work, some highly contested, in the last decade aimed at evaluating whether humans killed the megafauna. It is clear that we wiped out some species, but what happened 10 to 50 thousand years in the period before written history is still a mystery. Persaram Batra, visiting assistant professor of geology and geography, and his colleagues have waded into the fray with a neat article, “Climate Change, Humans, and the Extinction of the Wooly Mammoth,” in PLOS Biology that appeared last year. Their conclusion? The circumstantial evidence is damning: shrinking range, warming climate, and we were there as well…

Leszek Bledzki, senior research associate in biological sciences, has contributed the section on the order Copepoda: Calanoida (freshwater crustaceans) in Bogdanowicz, W., E. Chudzicka, I. Pilipuk & E. Skibinska (eds), Fauna of Poland: Characteristics and Checklist of Species (Muzeum i Instytut Zoologii PAN, Warszawa: v.3, 603 pp: 297-301 & 311). The three-volume book is a joint effort by several dozen researchers, most of whom are from Poland. (Apart from Leszek, the only other North American is a Polish-Canadian from McMaster University.) The order of Copepoda: Calanoida includes freshwater crustaceans similar to the species in Mount Holyoke’s Upper and Lower Lakes, Stony Brook, and the Connecticut River. These species are an important part of the freshwater ecosystem because of their ability, among other things, to control the blooming of algae and blue-green algae. The relatively small, six-page chapter took Leszek almost 20 years of collecting both field data from Poland and papers published over a hundred-year span.

If you get a chance, try to get ahold of a copy of Frank Brownlow, Gwen and Allen Smith Professor of English and chair of English’s paper “Eschatological Form in Skelton’s Poetry.” I believe it appeared in J. M. Cutcher, A. L. Prescott (eds.), Renaissance Historicisms: Essays in Honor of Arthur F. Kinney (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008) pp. 18–35. It discusses the fallout from the recent, and now widely accepted, discovery that Skelton wrote his dream-allegory “The Garland of Laurel” in the mid-1490s when he was in his 30s, and not in 1522–1523, when he was 60. In deadpan, utterly dry prose, Frank dissects the effect that the non-questioning acceptance of the wrong date (the “nonfact”) had on literary history and criticism. No one escapes: C. S. Lewis, A. C. Spearing, H. L. R. Edwards, and Stanley Fish. Frank must have had a great deal of fun writing the piece. The article also discovers the fascinating numerology in Skelton’s poems. A rather different article in the most recent issue of Spenser Studies [XXIII (2008): 1-12] argues that Spenser’s notion of the ancient British church is actually a short-lived, but utterly beguiling, Tudor creation: an institution that is both old and new, Catholic and Protestant, universal and local, and “thoroughly British.”

Leah Glasser, dean of first-year studies and lecturer in English, has an article in the May 1 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education in which she argues that failure, more precisely, learning from failure and freedom from fear of failure, can be gifts that a college gives a student, and the starting point for genuine learning.

Lauret Savoy, professor of environmental studies, writes on the inauguration and the tangled relation of Washington, D.C., and the slave trade. This is especially interesting if you know (or think you know) the city.

Bob Shilkret, Norma Cutts DaFoe Professor of Psychology, with Galina Markova and Djalev Liubomir, examines what turns out to be a close relationship between detached parenting styles and the likelihood that children will be institutionalized. They study the phenomenon in Bulgaria which has more infants in institutionalized care than any other country in Central or Eastern Europe. (See “Parents’ Attachment Styles, Mental Representations, and Institutionalization of Children in Bulgaria” [in Infant Mental Health Journal 29:6 (2008) 555-569].)

Kudos

An article by Wei Chen, Associate Professor and chair of chemistry, and her students that appeared in the most prestigious journal in physical chemistry is in the top ten (#6) on the list of “most read” articles.

Associate Professor of Spanish Nieves Romero-Diaz’s bilingual edition of Maria de Guevara’s “Warnings to the King and Advice on Restoring Spain” has won the 2008 Award of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women as the best translation or teaching edition published in their field in 2007.

Adrienne Greenbaum, Associate Professor of music, has been featured for two weeks on the front page of the websitefor the Judaica Sound Archives at Florida Atlantic University Libraries and is among their featured performers. This is a big deal and it is a form of archiving for performers. This particular archive is the most important source for all recordings of Jewish music.

William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies Roberto Marquez’s book Puerto Rican Poetry: An Anthology from Aboriginal to Contemporary Times was one of two winners of the 2009 prize for translation from the New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS).

Laurie Priest, director of athletics and chair of physical education and athletics, has received the MAHPERD’s (Massachusetts Association of Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance) annual Pathfinder award. This goes to the individual who has made outstanding contributions and shown great commitment to girls’ and women’s athletics.

Philosophy professor Tom Wartenberg’s review of TV show The Wire in Philosophy Now moved a prisoner in solitary in California to write Tom asking whether Tom would mentor him. The prisoner told Tom that he had gotten the account of drug dealer life just right!